So, DebConf is over and it was a blast. I wanted to blog
about my talks for a couple of days, but the conference was
so great that I did not get around to it until now.

The unique thing about this year's conference were the
outstanding contributions by non-Debian FLOSS people from
the east coast. I am really glad the organizers decided to
reach out to the communi
ty and take this opportunity when a lot of great minds were
just a couple of hours away. Also, discussing and hanging
out with the local team people was so much fun and
interesting that it was wor
th the visit alone.

The venue was just perfect, the dorms were on campus,
the
cafeteria had an all-you-can-eat buffet, everything was in
short walking distance and the Columbia campus is beautiful.
I would have liked to go to a couple more places in the
evenings, but hanging out in the Carman basement lounge with
awesome people was just as good. A big thanks to Richard
Darst, Biella, Micah and the rest of the
crew.

The Debian GNU/Hurd talk went quite well, I was
pleasantly surprised so many people made it to the Davis
auditorium. I wanted to do the presentation on Debian
GNU/Hurd (and I had it working before the talk), but as my
notebook has a different resolution than the projector, I
decided to play it safe and just show a d-i run in qemu.
Nevertheless, Jeremie's wo
rk on debian-installer is impressive, I got it installed
on my ThinkPad without a problem (using qemu) and it
automatically installed and setup grub2. Unfortunately,
grub2 seems to be having issues when booting my notebook
natively, but I got it to work with grub-legacy, including X
and evince.

There were quite a few comments and I had interesting
conversations afterwards with a couple of people. It is a
shame Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (pochu) could not make it to
DebConf to give the talk himself, he did lots of great work
on porting packages and fixing the Hurd and glibc for
various testsuites over the last couple of months.

My other talk about GOsa and FAI was a
bit rougher, I scrambled to get FAI integration in GOsa to
work based on Mark Pavlichuk'sinstallation
scripts which I fixed up over the last couple of weeks
to the point where one can install a client using the FAI
simple demo classes (which I ported to GOsa's FAI LDAP).
There were some problems with the demonstration during the
talk and I guess it was a tough audience for a web-based
admin tool but I hopefully got my point across that we
should salvage this work done for the city of Munich.
Indeed, I had great discussions with Andreas Mundt
from debian-edu afterwards who posted a summary and call for
discussion to the debian-edu mailing list.